Link building is a fast and constantly growing area in the world of SEO. Link building used to be used to drive visitors to your website

The Evolution of Link Building

building has come a long way before Google. Read on to better understand modern ties and how we got there.

Link building is a fast and constantly growing area in the world of SEO.

Since most of us know that backlinks are an essential part of modern SEO and will continue to be in the future, it is wise to understand not only where we are today, but also how we got there. .

It gives us a more solid basis for our decisions and helps us see through misunderstandings when someone is spreading a crazy theory.

Let's take a look at how link building has evolved over the years from Google's inception to the present day.

Pre-Google

When we think of link building, we often think of Google.

With the invention of its link building tactic as its algorithm, Google pioneered search engine optimization.

But even before Google was the dominant force that they are today, link building existed, it just hadn't played a role in SEO.

Link building used to be used to drive visitors to your website, not to manipulate search results.

At the time, marketers were using a tactic called web-rings, with web site owners posting pages that contained links to other related web sites.

They did this for a number of reasons: to help themselves, to help others in their industry, and even to help visitors, because, honestly, search engines were bad back then.

People have visited these pages in search of other interesting and useful websites.

At that time, there was not a single link that could be considered spam or black hat.

Not only was there no webmaster guide, but there was no incentive to post such links as it would have no impact.

And that would still be technically unrealistic, as domains and hosting were relatively expensive by today's standards, and websites were hand-coded in Notepad. Automation would be next to impossible.

People took a user-centric approach because.

Early Link Building for SEO

That Was All That Mattered It seems crazy, but once Google was starting a research project with two college students.

Since then, it has grown rapidly and started to absorb market share, finally becoming the giant it is today.

After marketers learned that inbound links were affecting Google's rankings, they set out to create or acquire as many resources as they could.

In no time, link building went from being a strategy with direct long-term benefits to a tactic with only indirect benefits in practice.

And like any other tactic, we have abused them.

We discovered all kinds of bonding tactics and then we used them on a large scale.

Ultimately, this prompted Google to release a disastrous update to the Penguin algorithm, which we will talk about later.

First, let's take a look at some of the early SEO link building tactics.

Reciprocal Links

linking One of the first popular link building tactics for SEO purposes was reciprocal linking, an adaptation of the old concept of web rings.

First of all, website owners simply publish a page which they then link to other websites in exchange for those websites linking to their own.

It quickly became categorized links and paginated lists, essentially a miniature directory.

To handle this tactic, special software has even been developed that automates much of the workflow.

A website owner must first link to their website from their own page and then fill out a form on their website to request a link.

In the backend, the bot analyzes your submission, verifies that your website is actually related to yours, and then sends that information to a queue for you to view and publish.

Many of these tools even had an email component that you could use to search for websites on a specific topic and send bulk emails to the owners of those websites asking them to link to your website in return.

The main difference between web rings and reciprocal links is that web rings almost always point to other highly relevant websites, while reciprocal links often point to websites that want to connect to them.

This tactic became less effective after some website owners began refusing to link.

They thought that linking to other websites would lower their linking power, so they tried to get other people to link to their website and not come back.

Some have made this transparent by simply stating that they are not linking to their website.

Others initially linked to the linked partner's website, only to remove the outbound link after a while.

Directory Links

When I was a child we had phone books, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. Today we have search engines that can immediately give the correct answer to almost any query.

Between these two periods we had a period in which these sources of information were mixed.

We had search engines, but they are not very good. We also had category catalogs that looked like old school phone books.

The two are often merged into one portal, as we've seen on Yahoo, AOL, AltaVista, and many others.

Website owners can submit their website for listing, or the directory owner can even add specific websites just because they have good information.

You can search for these portals. Or, if you just want to explore, you can jump to a specific category and click on the links.

It was not uncommon to end up deep in the rabbit hole at 4am after wandering all night.

During this time countless catalogs have been published. DMOZ was one of the largest non-profit boards at the time. There was no registration fee, but you had to get approval from the moderator and the queue was ridiculous.

In fact, some people have waited years to get listed, and in some cases moderators have simply ignored their competitors' suggestions.

Yahoo! There was also a manual, but a check fee was charged. They did not guarantee registration, but said they would refund you if you are not registered.

Screenshot of Yahoo! Go back to the directory home page while it was still active.

However, I personally don't know of anyone who has been rejected.

Note . Yahoo! The catalog no longer exists today.

Countless thousands of catalogs have appeared in many different forms. Some were hyper-targeted and targeted a very small niche, while others were general directories that literally linked to anyone willing to pay the fee.

It quickly became a standalone business model where people would launch new directories and then submit their URLs to existing directories to increase the number of links measured by Google PageRank or PR at the time.

Once a directory achieves an adequate PR rating, other people with new directories will submit theirs for inclusion.

Google no longer maintains a PageRank toolbar that displays a rounded PR ranking in your browser.

And that's not counting the regular business owners who also paid to get their website up and running.

Guestbook Links

In the beginning, everything on the internet was new, so we did a lot of things that people would probably find weird today.

Guest books are one of those things.

As the name suggests, guestbooks were a place for world visitors to leave a note that they had visited the site. It was a digital version of the doodle: “Dave was here! Spray paint on your school wall.

Visitors filled out a form and their response was posted in this website's guestbook for all to see. At first, it was a fun concept, but marketers quickly began to abuse it.

This was one of the first attachment tactics to be abandoned, mainly because it attracted a lot of garbage.

Paid Link Building

A tried and true tactic is creating paid links simply because it works. It is also significantly more effective than free link cold streaming.

It's also worth noting that many websites these days charge a fee to link to their website, no matter how interesting their content is.

In the beginning, people bought links from other highly relevant websites because their main goal was to attract users rather than manipulate rankings.

However, over time, they started buying links on all the websites due to their high page rank. The higher the score, the higher the price.

Ultimately, Google stopped publishing this review, forcing link buyers and sellers to use reviews from tool providers trying to mimic the Page Rank formula.

While the ratings from other tool providers may not match the page ratings and are not indicative of anything by themselves, they are a relative measure that can be used to compare the authority of different websites.

Google is clearly against buying links, and they talk about it out loud, but it doesn't matter in the real world.

Buying links is a flagrant violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines, like any othermethod linking.

In other words, unless you kneel by your bed and pray for people to link to your website, anything you do to get links is literally against your own guidelines.

And despite what it claims, Google cannot "discover and ignore" paid links widely or consistently. There is too much evidence to the contrary.

Today's paid links take many different forms.

Some marketers focus on buying links only from relevant, high-traffic, and authoritative websites, while others buy links from any website that may appear to be market-changing.

Although I personally believe that buying links can be an effective and safe tactic today, here are some caveats.

First of all, all the links you buy must have the potential to bring real visitors to your website.

If you buy a link for the sole purpose of manipulating the ranking, you won't get as much of an advantage from it.

Second, you need to be selective about where to buy links.

You can immediately trash any of those silly emails where a stranger offers to sell you links because they are offering them to everyone so you can be sure Google knows about them too.

And you can also ignore any website that seems to be linked to a bunch of random websites that don't make sense in context.

For example, a link to third-party data that supports a position or statement in an article is fine.

However, you are talking about a specific topic and are inadvertently linking to a business's home page, even if that business is relevant to the topic, it is a sign that you are likely selling links to such an extent that will not have a positive impact. impact on you to have.

Comment / Forum Spam

In the early days of the Internet, websites were mostly static. Blogs and forums have changed this by giving people the ability to interact in real time.

It also allowed marketers to create many backlinks that, in many cases, went unnoticed by website owners.

Blog Comments

Although you don't see them as often these days, most blogs had a comment section where visitors could post their thoughts at the end of a post.

Most blogs these days don't allow comments because spam comments and angry trolls aren't worth fighting for.

This tactic started when marketers realized that they could easily get a link by simply posting a comment on a blog post.

In most cases, a comment form contains name, email, and URL fields. When the comment was posted, the name became the anchor text associated with the URL for this field.

This is a screenshot of a blog comment form with standard fields.

But it was a daunting and unprofitable task to manually identify enough blogs and give them enough feedback to affect the rankings. Smart people who wanted to be more productive developed software to automate the process.

This software has enabled marketers to quickly create a large number of links by posting detailed comments on thousands of blogs in a single day. (I'll go into more detail on rotation later in the article submission section.)

There was a time when it was incredibly effective, until Google rolled out the update. Later, Google messed up their algorithm and they got back to work.

I will go into this aspect in more detail later in this article, as it is very important information that you need to know if you really want to understand modern link building.

Forum Links

Before social media became as popular as it is today, people gathered in forums to share news, ask questions, communicate, and debate.

Forums as link building channels come in two styles.

Forum Links Style #1

Style of The first and most obvious style was to post links in a forum. The key point here was the use of a certain level of social engineering in these positions.

Short-sighted link builders would take this approach by simply removing the link and running it.

Here is an example of spam links in a forum.

Unsurprisingly, they are removed almost immediately on any relatively active forum.

The smartest link builders will structure their posts so that they not only make sense, but often need to include a link as well. They usually last a while, if not forever.

Forum Links Style #2

Forum Linking Style A more subtle style was to create a forum account, add a URL to your profile, and move on. Since most forum owners did not have the time to observe each new user, it usually went unnoticed.

Unsurprisingly, the software was built for massive automation, which means that link developers didn't have to spend time on these forums - the software did 99% of the work.

Both styles were incredibly effective back then, but as social media replaced the role of forums, forums have become much smaller and less effective today.

Guest Posting

I have always liked this tactic because it is a holistic and trustworthy marketing tactic.

It has been around since the dawn of the internet. More importantly, there are still guest posts because it is still an incredibly effective tactic.

By sharing your knowledge on a larger platform that already has an established audience, you not only increase your brand awareness, but also gain valuable links to your website.

Sometimes these links are in your bio at the end of the article and sometimes even in the body of the article.

There is a natural barrier to entry here because to use this tactic effectively, you need to write well and have good manners to present your topic to the website owner or publisher.

Actually, it sounds more like traditional public relations than attachment.

The key is to identify which websites have constant traffic related to your product or service and offer to write about a topic that interests your audience.

When I say "relevant" here, I don't mean relevant in general. It is not enough to say, "Your website is about cars and mine is about cars." In fact, it is not even enough to say, "Your website is about cars and mine is about cars."

You have to be more specific.

If your website is about traditional muscle cars and your website is about small imported cars, your audience is unlikely to be interested in your "9 Reasons the Honda Civic is the Best Car of All Time."

In fact, they probably hated it and the website owner

probably would have been criticized by Alba.

When these criteria were met, guest posting became not just a powerful attention-grabbing tool, a strong personal brand, and in many cases a strong corporate brand.

Many marketers have thought that if a little is good, a lot should be better.

This has led to an increase in article directories.

Article Directories

effectiveness of guest posting,

As marketers realized how effective guest posting was, the next logical step was to scale the tactic.

In fact, the impact of this tactic was so great that it eventually led Google to take anti-linking measures that were unprecedented in the Penguin update.

Think of creating links from article directories as a more reliable way of creating links from blog comments. However, instead of just posting a comment on someone else's blog, you are posting an entire article.

Like link directories, article directories have quickly become a whole new industry.

Special software allowed site owners to start their own article directory with minimal expenditure of time and effort. New WordPress plugins have allowed you to add this feature to your existing website.

A huge article directory network quickly emerged where other link builders were eager to submit a large amount of content.

And they did.

Since I have my own network, I will say it first hand.

I searched hundreds of these directories and woke up every morning to find hundreds of new articles posted on each of them. The amount of new content was overwhelming.

Now I am saying that I am using the term "new content" here loosely.

The content was technically new in the sense that it could pass the Copyscape test, but it was not actually original content.

Marketers could write an article on a specific topic and then use Spintax to turn that content into a myriad of other articles so they can submit a "unique" article to each directory.

Specialized software reads this Spinax, randomly selected variables and creates technically unique content.

So your first suggestion might look like this:

Most white hat SEOs who say they are lying or don't know what they are talking about.

And your new Spintax offering might look like this:

{Lots | Almost everything | Most} {SEO experts | SEO specialists | Pros of SEO} Who {they say they are | they say | they claim | claim that} white hats {do not tell the truth | are not true | Lying} or they don't have {significant | real experience} | {understand | know} what they {speak | They say}}.

Here are some suggestions from Spintax: Search Engines, SEO to Talk

• About Almost everyone who calls themselves "white hats" is not telling the truth or is inexperienced with it.

• Most SEO professionals who call themselves "white hats" lie or do not understand what they are talking about.

• Many white hat SEO experts lie or do not understand what they are talking about.

• Almost all SEO professionals who call themselves white hats are either lying or not sure what they are talking about.

• Many SEOs who claim to be white hats lie or have no real experience.

It doesn't take long to see just how powerful this tool is.

Invest the money to write a decent article, then add the appropriate Spintax throughout the article, and now you can submit your unique article to hundreds or thousands of other websites, with each article linked to your website.

And just as the software was designed to work with these article directories, the software was designed to submit your articles to.

Create your accounts, promote articles and submit them to directories. All I had to do was submit the article, add the Spintax, and then run the program.

I have personally used both sides of this equation.

I used this link building tactic by submitting advanced articles with links to my own large websites, but also maintaining my own article directory network.

These directories generated advertising revenue, collected email addresses, and even became valuable assets that I could link to on my own websites.

In essence, they have become a new source of income, a new marketing channel, and my own huge PBN of hundreds of websites that Google has viewed positively.

While they were away.

As for the technology, Google saw it as a black hat, invisible behind the scenes, planning a massive algorithm update to combat what they saw as attachment manipulative techniques.

Before I talk about this, I want to take a minute to explain what counts as black hat link building.

Black Hat Link Building

Most SEO professionals like to classify themselves as white hat or black hat, but most people who claim to be white hat lie or are wrong.

So what is the difference between a white hat and a black hat?

Presumably a white hat means you are following all of the search engine webmasters guidelines, while a black hat means you are not.

Sounds easy enough, right?

I think it is.

That would be an unpopular opinion, but it means that literally anything you do to get links to your website falls into the Black Hats category.

According to the Google Webmaster Guidelines, "intervening with link schemes" is the second thing to avoid.

How does Google determine the link scheme?

Google defines "Link Scheme" as follows:

All links used to manage the PageRank or ranking of a website in Google search results can be seen as part of a linking system and as a violation of the guidelines : Google Webmasters. This includes any behavior that manipulates the links to your site or the outbound links from your site.

In other words, literally anything you do to get links.

Blog comments and forum spam? Yes sir. We can all agree on that.

But what about public relations? Of course, it is organic because your brand is presented based on what it is doing or has already done, right?

Did you ask a journalist for a link to your website or did you just send him your URL in the hope that he would?

So you've violated Google's webmaster guidelines by manipulating links to your website and are now officially a black hat.

Welcome to the club. We have T-shirts, we meet on Thursdays.

But when most logical people (who don't work as Google reps) think of black hat links, they tend to think of this tactic:

• linking to blog comments.

• Links to forums.

• Links to profiles.

• Mutual connections.

• Private blog networks (PBN).

• Pirated links to websites.

• Guest post with changing content.

• Purchase links.

• Link Wheels Web 2.0.

• Links to widgets.

• Free links on topics.

We usually talk about poor quality links that are easy to automate.

The reality is that what most logical people think is a black hat and what Google thinks is a black hat are two completely different things.

Ultimately, the decision is entirely up to Google, and it is up to us where we stand in terms of risk and reward.

If you want to fully follow their recommendations, you will have to give up link building entirely.

Just know that by doing so, you are giving your competition a huge advantage over you.

If you are willing to take risks and play in the gray area, you should know that Google's reaction could ruin your business one day.

Here's what business owners and marketers learned in 2012 when Google released the Penguin update.

Hell Hath No Fury Like Google Scorned

in 2012, Google took massive measures to combat link building tactics it deemed manipulative.

By releasing an update to its Penguin algorithm, Google virtually wiped out thousands of companies overnight.

It was a "burn the crops and salt the soil" upgrade.

Not only was the penalty harsh - many companies didn't even search by name - it was often unfounded, as the algorithm was prone to generating false positives.

In most cases, the business owner caught in the crossfire by Penguin had no choice but to start a new domain.

A lot of people learned this the hard way when it came to the box.

While they could spend a ton of money removing offensive links, it was not a guarantee that they would re-register.

And even if it did, it would start from scratch.

Countless business owners have done just that to sit back and wait (sometimes for years) without giving up. There is no indication. Even the answer.

Then, over the next several years, Google destroyed its own algorithm while launching a follow initiative.

It is simply an HTML attribute that allows website owners to tell search engines to ignore links marked with that attribute.

It should help Google identify and ignore non-editorial links.

In other words, it was a signal to Google and the other search engines not to use the tagged link to positively influence the ranking of the linked page.

Sounds easy enough, right?

Almost immediately, most blogs, forums, and other web platforms implemented the nofollow attribute in their code base, making many black hat tactics unnecessary.

But then publishers, from small blogs to top-tier outlets like the Wall Street Journal, started applying it to literally every outbound link.

The nofollow attribute destroyed the effectiveness of some spam link building tactics, but it also effectively destroyed Google's ability to understand contextual links.

This created a whole new problem that had to be solved quietly behind the scenes.

How did Google do it?

They did this by ignoring the nofollow attribute.

This got us back to where we were before the Penguin update, but this time, most people had no idea that virtually all black hat bonding tactics were back in the game.

You may have heard SEO experts and even Google employees say that this tactic is not working today.

Perhaps your claims ring true.

But the truth is that they are completely wrong.

All the world. Only. To you.

SEOs who claim this tactic doesn't work are making these claims for one of two reasons, and I don't know which is the worst.

One of the reasons is that they really have no idea what they are talking about when it comes to this topic. I think this reason applies to most of the people who make this claim.

Another reason is that they know this tactic works and they use it, but they pretend they are white hats to keep repeating Google's thesis over and over again. I think this reason applies to a very small percentage of people who make this claim.

I learned this a few years ago when I started experimenting with blog comments to link to pre-existing websites. Also, I have purposely created all kinds of tracks.

For each website I used the exact same anchor text and created almost 300,000 links, all pointing to the home page in less than a week from a random collection of blogs.

Many of these blogs were unrelated to the tested website, were spam, or contained primarily content in languages ​​other than English.

Everything Google says will raise red flags leading to algorithmic or manual punishment was massive.

Did any of these sites receive an algorithm or manual penalty?

No.

But Google must have ignored those spam links, right?

Also not.

Instead, all of these sites have seen dramatic increases in rankings and organic traffic.

Now you might be thinking, “Ha! But how long did it take you, Jeremy?

Well, it's been two years and the odds and attendance are still stable!

Does that sound like a tactic that is not working?

Is Link Building Dead?

Every few years we hear someone say that the link is dead. And despite these claims, the bonding continues more active than ever.

I understand that many of these people are making these ridiculous statements just for publicity. It's PR 101 - say something shocking or controversial and people will talk about it.

You don't have to search far to find thousands of examples of this, both within the SEO industry and in general.

But there is another side to this coin, in my opinion, that I think is much more insidious: crazy theories about how link building will play out.

One of them (which I'll explain in detail in the next article) in particular is the idea that search engines will soon magically determine the value of content and use it as a ranking factor rather than actual links.

This idea, launched by Random Fishkin, is exactly the kind of nonsense that leads to SEO myths created and repeated by inexperienced SEO professionals and small business owners.

Link building is far from dead and most experts agree.

While consensus doesn't necessarily turn a position into fact, I can safely say that links are unlikely to die in our lifetime - just making the web easy to use makes links indispensable. Links are the only logical way to show the "vote" for a particular page.

Enter Digital PR

is most effective in terms of integrity and offers the most long-term value.

This is the future of link building as it cannot be replicated or scaled with automated methods.

Think of it this way: Let's say you have a great product and invite a blogger or journalist to write about it. They fit and describe the specific characteristics of your product, your company and your person.

Now your readers will see this article and learn more about your product, your company, and yourself.

The article will likely have at least one link, if not more, and could even secure a position in your brand's search results.

Thanks to this successful offering, you have achieved / earned:

• Brand awareness.

• Exposition.

• Trust through implicit consent.

• One or more links.

• Position in the SERP of your brand.

• Advanced search by brand.

But this is not a one-time hit!

This produces results for months or even years and creates a snowball effect where the more you earn, the more you earn.

Once you have enough momentum and are perceived as an authority in your industry, public relations becomes, to a degree, a machine in its own right. But that doesn't mean you have to take your foot off the gas if it happens.

There will always be someone ready for dinner. No matter how dominant you are in your position, it is important to keep pushing.

It can be a little zero-sum game because if an article is about your business, you probably won't be writing about your competition for a while.

It is very possible that the media coverage and related links that you are missing today are the ones that will allow your competition to overtake you in the future.

The first and most important thing is that you have a story to tell. Most people do not know, and many of those who honestly do not know how to tell their story.

When telling your story, you need to understand both your audience and the audience for the message you posted. It is important that you understand your audience so that your story is captured and reached out to people.

From there, you should develop relationships with journalists, bloggers, editors, producers, and others responsible for posting content on the internet.

Yes, you can get results by serving it cold, but it is rare and difficult. When you communicate with someone you chat with regularly, your messages are the top priority.

Here's a perfect example ...

I recently hosted a club room with several media professionals and some of the people in the room were friends of mine. After this piece was finished, another publicist in the room spoke to one of the television hosts and told the story to one of his clients.

None of that came out.

It should be noted that this publicist, who is very close to me, has a lot of experience and skill, so I know that the presentation was skillfully prepared and presented.

To be of service to this publicist, I told her the story on her behalf.

I received a positive response in minutes.

Same step. Same story. The same period. The same TV host.

The only difference was my relationship.

This shows the importance of relationships in this model and also shows that unlike traditional link building, PR is not easy to use or automate.

It won't be the end of the link building evolution, but I think this final big evolution will be the main link building tactic for years to come.

The bond will develop with or without you.

Are you developing or are you late?